Crunching Tips (from RAMMIE's post) (Edited by Ion to reflect changes):
1 A dedicated cruncher doesn't need more than 2GB or 4GB of RAM.1 stick is best.The single channel penalty is easy to make up with increased CPU clocks.CPU speed rules in these projects. My personal rule is to go with at least X/3 GB of RAM, where X is the number of threads the CPU(s) in your rig has. While you can go lower, it isn't recommended. 2GB of RAM is fine for a four-thread cruncher (Pentium, i3, Phenom II X4, etc) but 4GB is better suited for 8-thread machines (AMD FX-8, Intel Core i7)
2 Timings and RAM speed don't matter much. Again go for CPU speed.
3 x64 OS and 64 BOINC client will get more points than 32 (generally about 10%).
4 Human Proteome Folding creates a lot of problems on a lot of machines. Avoid this project if you see errors in it. We've also been seeing a lot of errors stemming from the Clean Energy Project - Phase 2. If it works fine for you, obviously feel free to run it, but drop it if there are issues. The most common problem thus far has been WUs that "run in circles" and keep the CPU @ load while not actually accomplishing anything.

Work Buffer:
By default, BOINC has a work buffer (stored tasks) set to .25 days. This means that your computer has at least enough work to keep running for .25 days without downloading more WUs. It is recommended to set this to anywhere from 2-5 days so that in case there is a network outage the computer will still have work to do. If the computer is not on much, setting the work buffer to anything higher than 2 days is not advised because the system may not be able to finish the tasks by the deadlines. My personal preference is three days, that way there is generally enough work to last the computer through any project outage, but if something happens to the system, you can still usually complete all of the tasks by their deadlines
(All credit for the work buffer mention goes to dustyshiv, thanks!)

BOINC Live CD: The BOINC live CD is a useful tool for people building dedicated WCG computers who are looking to avoid purchasing Windows or the sometimes-complex set up of Linux. BOINC Live CD

WCG on Ubuntu: For a dedicated WCG setup, it is cheaper to use a USB flash drive running Linux than to purchase a HDD and a copy of Windows. Download the latest version of Ubuntu here and the Linux Universal USB installer here. Then, create an Ubuntu flash drive with the following steps:

1. Format your 4GB-or-larger USB Flash Drive.
2. Launch the Universal USB Installer, and select "Ubuntu 12.10 Desktop" from the drop-down menu. Point the Installer to your USB Flash Drive. You will need to make a persistence file, otherwise everything is lost when the computer is shut down. I recommend using the rest of the flash drive.
3. Click Create, and wait for up to half an hour (creating the persistence file takes a while).
4. Once the flash drive is created, boot Ubuntu and launch the Ubuntu Software Center:
5. Search for BOINC in the box in the upper right-hand corner. There will be only one result, click on it. About a third of the way down the window will be a button that says "Use Source". Click on it, and wait while the source was added. Then click on "Install" and wait while BOINC is installed.
6. Once BOINC is installed, it will be in the list of applications on the left side of the screen. Click on it, and add the World Community Grid project in the box that pops up. You may choose to configure it as shown above.

Overclocking: To overclock or not to overclock In WCG, points production scales linearly with the CPU speed. Thus, for example, a 4ghz CPU would get 50% more points per day (and work done) than the same CPU running at 2.66ghz. However, overclocking is not always a good thing. If your overclock is unstable, errors will be generated and the work returned will not be scientifically useful. If you plan on OCing, make sure your OC is stable, if it is it can pass 2+ hrs of OCCT and 12/16 hours of Prime95. Remember, if errors are produced the results will not be scientifically useful, and crunching time will have been wasted. This is an enthusiast forum, so we do tend to overclock here. Overclocking can bring considerable benefits, with 25-40% overclock not being uncommon on enthusiast CPUs. Remember, points scale with clock speed, so this does help.

Crunchers Helping Crunchers: Do you need a specific part to get a new cruncher up and running? Or do you have spare parts to donate to someone to help them get a cruncher up and running? If so, post visit Crunchers Helping Crunchers and post what you need/have to offer

Show off your WCG farm: Do you enjoy looking at other people's systems? Do you want to share pics of your WCG rig or rigs? If so, post pics in the WCG rig showcase here: Show off your WCG farm

Want an estimate of the PPD your computer could produce? If so, check out this thread where I wrote a simple app that does just that: give an estimate what sort of PPD a variety of Core 2/Core iX and Athlon/Phenom systems will give. Simple WCG PPD Estimator

By default, BOINC comes configured to use no more than 60% of the processor. To fix this, go to Advanced-->Preferences, and locate the box that says "Use at most ___% CPU Time", and enter 100%. On newer versions of BOINC it also has a box that says "While processor usage is less than ___ percent" Enter 0 here for best performance

WCG on GPUs(New!) -- No longer applicable, as the HCC project has finished!

World Community Grid has recently added support for computations on video cards (GPUs). Because GPUs are architecturally very different from CPUs, there is less that they can do, but they are extremely fast at a limited set of things. Consequently, if you have a modern GPU, consider running WCG on it. A Geforce GTX470 will complete a GPU WU approximately every three minutes, for a total of about 16k PPD (by comparison, an overclocked i7 quad may be ~6k PPD). Please note, running GPU WUs will slow down your computer. In order to get around this, on computers that are also used for other things, I suggest setting BOINC to only use the GPU while the computer is not in use (BOINC Manager -> Advanced View -> Tools -> Computing Preferences -> Processor Usage -> make sure that "Use GPU while computer is in use" is unchecked). For a dedicated WCG system, you generally want the GPU to crunch all of the time, so leave this box checked. In order to get GPU tasks, you must have selected the Help Conquer Cancer project here or checked the box "If there is no work available for my computer for the projects I have selected above, please send me work from another project." Of course, you must also check "If my computer can process work on my graphics card, then please send me work to run on my graphics card for the projects that I have selected above."
Here is a list of video cards that will not run the WCG GPU tasks:

If your card is one of these, sorry, you're out of luck, but you can at least crunch on the CPU

It is possible to run multiple tasks on each GPU at once in order to increase output on certain cards. On most mid-range video cards, a single WU will load the card to ~90-95% utilization. For more powerful cards, however, WCG isn't able to fully saturate the card, so running multiple tasks on it at once can increase output. For more information on setting this up, see KieX's thread here. This requires some configuration to get working properly, so be forewarned. This is best suited for cards like the Radeon HD7950/HD7970 and Geforce GTX670/GTX680.

Badges!
If you're proud to crunch for Team TechPowerUp! and want to show it off to the forum, we have signature badges to let the world know! Here are the requirements:
badge - 100,000 points total and activity on your WCG account
badge + 1 star - 500 points per day (7 day average)
badge + 2 stars - 2,000 points per day (7 day average)
badge + 3 stars - 4,500 points per day (7 day average)
badge + 4 stars - 8,000 points per day (7 day average)
badge + 5 stars - 12,000 or greater points per day (7 day average)

How do you get these badges? Go to your UserCP, click on Edit Options, and scroll all the way down to the bottom. Then, enter your WCG username (whatever name you chose when you registered on the World Community Grid website) and click Save.
You will receive whatever badge your output qualifies you for

If I'm missing any other threads/info, PM me and I'll update this post.

I'm not sure this is the best place to put this since it's really stats related, but mod, feel free to mover and/or repost elsewhere.

I've been corresponding with Bok (Phil) at Free-DC about the upcoming TPU WCG team ad and he gave me some information about the mechanics behind gathering and calculating the stats for BOINC projects and some specific info on WCG. It's not stuff you really need to know as a user, but I think it's really interesting. It also makes you appreciate the dedication of guys like Phil.

I had a quick look over at your forum and thought I might share some other links with you regarding the stats updates

The way I do the stats is actually a little different to most of the other sites but we all struggle with the sheer amount of data we are given when you combine all the boinc projects together. I also additionally do stats on most of the non BOINC projects too which adds to the complexity.

I have two scripts which are running constantly. First one polls each project for a very small file called tables.xml in their /stats directory. It checks the update time on this file and if it is different to the one held in the database here it will go ahead and download the new files for team/user/host data for that project. Most of these aren't too big but Seti/Climate Prediction/World Community Grid can be fairly large. WCG's host file compressed is 162Mb. Seti's is quite a bit larger.. Once they have been downloaded I have another script which is checking for newer files and once it finds them it will uncompress and start parsing the data into a database.

It throws everything in and computes ranks and such across the project, within team,country etc etc. Then checks for new milestones, movement. All in all for WCG alone this can be well over 1million sql statements and this is actually without the initial inserts as I do them via fast load into mysql. Add those and it would be upwards of 5million sql statements.

Once the script has done a round of projects, it then goes on to do the combined updates to team/user/country and their ranks and such and on completion it runs some replication tasks to copy the raw data over to the web facing database (in order for the website to never be locked up whilst the data is being parsed and calculated).

If the script finishes a loop and realizes that it has crossed midnight it will start all of it's daily rollover tasks and take backups and such.

Hope this explains the delay between getting new data and showing it

This page is not really advertised but I use it as a brief check of when data was updated. You can take out the proj=bwcg part to show all projects.

Thanks guys, just one question: does 12,000 PPD sound about right for a PhII X2 555BE (unlocked to three cores and O.C.'ed to 3.8GHz)?
I'm pretty adventurous, and information is addictive so I'll have a good old read before asking questions

Thanks guys, just one question: does 12,000 PPD sound about right for a PhII X2 555BE (unlocked to three cores and O.C.'ed to 3.8GHz)?
I'm pretty adventous, and information is addictive so I'll have a good old read first

Click to expand...

Yep, that sounds pretty good, that's about what my X4 955 got ~ 3ghz (when I was experimenting with underclocking/undervolting)